Colonial American Name Generator

A colonial American name tells you which colony a person came from before it tells you anything else. New England drew on the Old Testament and on Puritan virtue names: Ebenezer, Jabez, Eliphalet, Mehitable and Keziah alongside Thankful, Patience, Submit and Waitstill, attached to Massachusetts and Connecticut surnames like Thaxter, Wolcott, Hotchkiss and Leffingwell. Virginia and Carolina gentry used a narrow English stock (William, Lucy, Betty, Landon) and turned family surnames into given names: Armistead Taliaferro, Carter Burwell, Dandridge Fitzhugh, while the Charleston Lowcountry added French Huguenot families such as Manigault, Mazyck, Prioleau and Porcher.

The middle colonies were the most mixed. Pennsylvania Quakers favored plain names (Isaac Norris, Phebe Mendenhall, Mahlon Scarborough); Pennsylvania Germans used paired names like Johann Georg and Anna Barbara with Hochstetler, Brubaker and Oberholtzer; the Hudson Valley and Long Island stayed Dutch for generations (Annetje Van Rensselaer, Teunis Van Dyck, Catalyntje Beekman); Welsh Tract settlers brought Griffith, Rees and Cadwalader. On the backcountry frontier, Scots-Irish families like the McDowells, Breckinridges and Calhouns used Archibald, Grizel, Lachlan and Isobel. Enslaved and free Black colonists appear in records as Cato, Pompey, Cuffee, Phillis and Dinah with surnames such as Freeman.

The list mixes all of these communities so you can pick a name that fits a specific colony, decade and station.